Monique will be talking about her personal approach to tackling a long peice of writing, offering tips on how to go about planning, thinking through, writing, structuring and articulating your work.

If you are interested in attending this free workshop, please email Neelam at n.sidhar@sussex.ac.uk

Wednesday November 29 (Week 9),
EDB 341 5.30 to 6.30 pm

DOUBLE BILL:
Sharif Mowlabucus (University of Sussex): “Uni_cock: Online identities and Sexual Practice” + Jerome Hansen (University of Sussex): “From Laboratories to Palaces: Sound, art worlds and the studio-network”

I’d be grateful if you could confirm your intention to join us, by
Tuesday 5th December. Email Elaine (t.e.saunders@sussex.ac.uk)

Please contact Polly Ruiz (P.E.Ruiz@sussex.ac.uk) if you have any questions, issues, complaints!

Many of you already know this, but I thought I would remind you that DPhil
students are able, with the tutor’s agreement, to attend MA classes (I know
some of you have been doing this on this term’s MA Media core course).

Below is a list of the MA options planned for next term and the person (who
is not necessarily the course tutor) you should contact if you are
interested in attending classes:

Promotional Culture (Janice Winship)
Video Documentary and Contemporary History (Lizzie Thynne)
Feminism and Film (Sue Thornham)
Queering Popular Culture (Andy Medhurst)
Space and Representation (Sally Munt)
Approaches to Film Noir (Frank Krutnik)
European Media in Transition (Kate Lacey)
Media Audiences (Thomas Austin)

If any of you do decide to attend an MA course, please email Andy Medhurst.

:: fibreculture :: has established itself as Australasia’s leading forum
for discussion of internet theory, culture, and research. The Fibreculture
Journal is a peer-reviewed journal that explores the issues and ideas of
concern and interest to both the Fibreculture network and wider social
formations.

Papers are invited for the ‘After convergence’ issue of the Fibreculture
Journal, to be published early in 2008. Guest editors are Caroline Bassett
(Sussex, UK), Maren Hartmann (Bremen, Germany) and Kate O’Riordan
(Lancaster/Sussex, UK).

There are guidelines for the format and submission of contributions at
http://journal.fibreculture.org

These guidelines need to be followed in all cases. Contributions should be
sent electronically, as word attachments, to:

Guest editors:
Caroline Bassett (c.bassett@sussex.ac.uk )
Maren Hartmann (maren.hartmann@uni-bremen.de)
Kate O’Riordan (k.oriordan@lancaster.ac.uk)

Everything that arises does not converge. A more variegated landscape
emerges as processes of digitalization, crystallizations of an
intrinsically technological-social, continue re-shaping cultures and
re-working societies, not in their image, but into something new. It is
increasingly obvious that there is no digital behemoth, no single form, no
single function, no New World Order. Rather a series of reconfigurations,
reformulations, new functions, new contents, new spaces, new grounds, new
uses, have emerged and are emerging within global media networks.

In response to the (not unexpected) non-arrival of the unifying beast,
which is to say in response to the perceived exhaustion of convergence (or
the re-definition of its limits), new disciplinary islands are being
declared with ‘keep out’ and ‘invented here’ signs all over their beaches.
In other words there has been a balkanization of techno-cultural
investigation. Thus gaming scholars define themselves against internet
scholars, or film scholars, locatives stand distinct from screeners.
Particular groups of sub-specialists claim particular modes of inquiry:
ethnographers for everyday life, speculative theory for digital art, for
instance. Indeed, entire vocabularies, originally invoked in a spirit of
general experimentation, are now corralled, restricted and defended by
particular groups. If these vocabularies often seize up in the process,
refusing to say more than they were meant to say, and in particular
refusing the unorthodox connections between the empirical and the
speculative, the possible and the desirable, that gave them their energy in
the first place, nobody seems to notice.

So, there is no behemoth. At the same time we insist that connections are
produced and so a question we consider worth addressing is not what unites
digital forms as one, but what connects them together as many. Further we
want to explore how these connections are made. We are less interested in
doing that through mainstreaming a particular critical approach (which is
to say drawing different areas back under one critical umbrella, making
that the connection), than we are in trying to think about
exploring/defining/critiquing some of the shared characteristics of
different digital media formations. We believe that despite the exhaustion
of convergence metaphors, and the rise of disciplinary sub-divisions, these
connections remain crucial.

Papers addressing but not limited to the following topics are welcome:

* Media/Medium Theory

* Difference between and specificity of New Media forms

* Issues, Limits, Problems of Convergence.

* Re-thinking the vocabulary of Affect/Emotion/Perception

* Histories of New Media Theory

* ‘Technology and Cultural Form’ revisited?

* Methodologies

Deadlines:

* 250 word abstracts: due February 28th 2007

* Completed Paper: due September 30th 2007

* Expected Publication: February 28th 2008.

Weds 21 March 2007, Cubby Broccoli Cinema, Free Entry

NATIONAL MUSEUM of PHOTOGRAPHY, FILM and TELEVISION (UK)

CALL FOR PAPERS
Proposals are invited for papers that engage with issues of
representation within film and videographic media: the mainstream
(Hollywood/Bollywood), fine art, cult or the edges of popular
culture. 200 words synopses should be sent by 1 December 2006 to:

Jill Good, MA Visual Culture, Bradford School of Art, Bradford College,
Carlton
Street, BD7 1AY. Tel: (+44)1274 431660; email: j.good@bradfordcollege.ac.uk

Ask for details of Vols. 1-5, Crash Cinema: The Proceedings (ISSN
1743-4459)

The revolution has already happened. There isn’t a choice here. This stuff is happening and its radically and constantly changing our entire field. Media studies has to keep up. To date the most exciting and innovative appreciation of new media has come from sociology and cultural / cyberculture studies. Media studies just didn’t want to look at technology because, after Raymond Williams, we’re all terrified of the sin of ‘technological determinism’. Plus we didn’t need any new theory because we had audience studies and endless interviews with Buffy and Sex and the City fans … The result is it’s taken a long time for the subject to catch up and to catch on to the fact that the revolution has already happened. It’s time to upgrade Media Studies. It’s time for Media Studies 2.0.

[Read more...]

The paper will consider gay drama in relation to arguments about nationhood
and cultural identity; Irish materials will be used to draw out more
general observations.

*** Please circulate amongst postgraduate researchers ***

‘Sharing Experience’ – Audiences in Media, Communication and Cultural
Studies

A MeCCSA Postgraduate Network symposium at the Department of Theatre, Film
and Television Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK

3rd – 4th April 2007

Audiences come in all shapes and forms – as viewers, listeners, readers,
users, participants, fans, aficionados and learners – focusing their
attention on a variety of sources within an increasingly changing media
landscape. The range and diversity of audiences and their experiences is
both exciting and challenging for researchers, and it is the very nature
of the field that requires a multitude of systematic approaches when
studying and teaching about audiences.

This training day aims to bring together postgraduate researchers
interested in the broad field of audience and reception studies, whether
this is in relation to contemporary or historical audiences, theoretical
or empirical work, quantitative or qualitative studies, questions or
answers. In addition to presenting and discussing their work in thematic
panels, there will be an opportunity for delegates to take part in
workshops
concerned with ‘how to do’ and ‘how to teach’ audience and reception
studies.

Confirmed speakers include Professor Jenny Kitzinger (Cardiff School of
Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies) and Professor Martin Barker
(Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Aberystwyth).

We welcome abstracts of 200 words to be sent to
sharing_experience@hotmail.com by 1st December 2006. Please also briefly
indicate why you would like to participate in this event, and what you
would hope to get out of it. In particular, we are interested to hear
about the issues of teaching and methodology that might become relevant to
you in the process of your work.

For more information about the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, visit
http://www.meccsa.org.uk/pgn/.